Successful Relationships

Seamus had an assignment in his writing class to come up with what makes for a successful relationship. He asked me to read/edit his paper, and while it's one of the more succinct explanations, I thought it was on the money, especially since it makes me look good. So, I'll share a shortened version with you. My comments/translations are in bold for your reading pleasure.

...Initially, the basic idea of friendship occupied my mind for several reasons. To begin, I have had previous relationships end because of a lack of friendship, and more importantly, my current relationship is very successful because my girlfriend and I are best friends. (yeah, it's really nice that I can talk about poop with her.) I was surprised to find out that no one else in my group had included friendship in their list. I found that their lists contained more base human emotions (perkiness of the butt, etc) that are also important to successful relationships.

Through reading their lists, I realized that I would not have a continued successful romantic relationship if I had not been initially attracted to my soon to be girlfriend on a more basic level. (thankfully, she's a total foxxxx) Had I not been attracted physically to my girlfriend, I might not have even asked her out.

Further, I realized that as a couple we would need the ability to not take everything seriously. I didn't think of this in the beginning because it has never been a problem for me in the past. (seeing as we regularly impersonate dinosaurs, we CAN'T take each other seriously) However, I can see how being too serious would bring negativity into any relationship. In life there are bound to be hard times, and at some point everyone makes mistakes and causes offense to their partner. (like that time that she said she didn't want to listen to ACDC) If both parties take every offense, big and small, seriously and do not let things go sometimes, it can cause major problems in the relationship.
Later in the discussion, the idea of political affiliation was brought up. This idea leads me also to the idea of religious affiliation. To be honest, I cannot believe that I omitted these issue on my own list, given their importance. As a non-religious Democrat in Utah, these are considerations that come into play not just in romantic relationships, but also in friendships, even in professional relationships. While I am myself open to social viewpoints that are not in keeping with my own and am able to have friends that do no share my views, I do not think that I would be able to dedicate my self to a long term romantic relationship with someone whose views I disagreed with on such a fundamental level. (example: I could never love someone who liked Bon Jovi)

These were the ideas I took away from class. However, later that evening when I was talking with my girlfriend on an unrelated subject this topic came up. (we were talking about robots of course) We talked about it for a little while, and my girlfriend made a very astute observation. While we both share a lot of common interests and have similar personalities, (both obnoxious misanthropes) we both have our differences. These differences complement each other in such a way that makes both of us better people. For example, I deal with problems by internalizing them. (hence the gas problem) My girlfriend deals with problems by rehashing them. (not literal hash) Alone, these behaviors can be self destructive . Together, we are able to bring each other to a happy medium so that we can work around the problems we encounter in such a way that might not have been possible without our partnership.

Finally, as I write this, I am realizing what all of this boils down to. A long term successful romantic relationship is not based entirely on friendship and sense of humor, the most important thing is that your parter makes you happy and you do the same for your partner. (awwww)